Crimea

When Ukraine threatened the autonomous status of Crimea, the people of that territory on March 16, 2014 voted in a popular referendum to declare independence from Ukraine and apply to join the Russian Federation as an autonomous republic. The results of the referendum were overwhelmingly for independence and retrocession to Russia with 96.7 percent of eligible voters opting for separation from Ukraine...

Following the death of President Tito in 1980 the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia slid towards chaos. In the 1990s the plunge accelerated into civil war and one of the regions most affected was Kosovo from which Serbia withdrew after a NATO bomb and rocket offensive from 24 March to 11 June 1999. That blitz involved over 1,000 mainly American aircraft conducting some 38,000 airstrikes on Yugoslavia that killed approximately 500 civilians and destroyed much of the economic and social infrastructure of the region...

Zafer Üskül, the head of the unofficial Turkish delegation that visited the Republic of Crimea at the end of April, has shared some of his thoughts with the Anadolu Agency. The Turkish professor’s report contained a number of harsh accusations against the Russian authorities, which he believes are systematically violating the rights of those living on the peninsula. This refers to an alleged violation of citizens’ language, property and personal rights. The findings have apparently been made on the basis of discussions with a wide range of people, and the text produced as a result of the visit was handed to Vladimir Putin by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan during a recent meeting between the Russian and Turkish presidents in Baku...

Obama also signed off on new sanctions to hit the people of Crimea, for their audacity to vote in a referendum in March to secede from the neo-Nazi regime that his CIA shunted into power... As US President Barack Obama departed from the White House last Friday for Christmas holidays with his family in sunny Hawaii, he bequeathed his signature to a Congress «present» for the Kiev regime. Among the «goodies» are millions of dollars worth of lethal military aid for the regime that seized power in an illegal coup in February this year... As the world prepares to celebrate Christmas – an occasion of peace, joy and salvation for humanity – Washington and its allies in Canada and the European Union see fit to unleash more sanctions on Russia, fuel further misery and suffering in Ukraine, and perhaps most perniciously, to stoke conditions for larger war...

The annual address to the Federal Assembly by the Russian president is an occasion to dilate on the state policies, but this year’s speech by Vladimir Putin on Thursday at the Kremlin’s St George Hall before a 1000-strong audience of the country’s elites was invested with special importance... In a memorable passage, Putin drove home that the struggle over Ukraine touches on the inner cords of the Russian psyche. He said Crimea is as sacred to the Russian nation as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is for the followers of Islam and Judaism. «And this is how we will always consider it». Wouldn’t the Americans know this only too well?..

Russia is open to the rest of the world and ready for developing equal partnership with other countries, said Vladimir Putin He dismissed treatment Russia through strength and sanctions as ineffective and warned against scheming. “Talking to Russia from a position of strength is meaningless,” said Putin in his annual state of the nation address to the Federal Assembly, stressing that the ‘deterrence policy’ towards Russia is nothing new.

Vladimir Putin faced a barrage of tricky questions in France from the media ahead of his meeting with world leaders at the 70th anniversary of the Normandy landings. Here are his best replies on key issues: Ukraine, Crimea and relations with the US.

...The caricature-like nature of the «national revolution» which was victorious in Kiev and the crudeness of the work of its outside financers and directors are as unprecedented as they are provocative. The audacity of the «democratizers» cannot but bring about major consequences... A new period in history, opened by the reunification of Crimea and Russia, demands non-standard political solutions from the leaders of the world's leading countries. And in and of itself, this is an obvious reaction to the long, unceremonious and merciless offensive of Western neoliberalism... Russia's Crimean manifesto may signify the beginning of a turbulent era in which world views and strategies can be overturned, political discourses and forms of government can change, and new ideologies and international borders can appear...

The reunification of Crimea and Russia was an event whose international scale, as is now clear, exceeds not only the scale of Russian-Ukrainian relations, but also the European format of world politics and even the larger «West – Russia» format. It is no exaggeration to say that this event marked an upheaval on a global level... Many point to the turning back of Yevgeny Primakov's airplane over the Atlantic in 1999 as one of the first signs of the emergence of the polycentric world. The fifteen years which have passed since then have confirmed both the correctness of the change in course and the accuracy of Russia's staking on China and India as new partners. In this sense the Crimean saga of 2014 was the historically predictable response to the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999...

Officials from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, who modestly remained silent during the coup d’état in Ukraine and have not said a word about the tragedies in Odessa and Mariupol, have begun to raise a storm of activity around the «road map» for Ukraine. Some provisions of this document (it has not been presented to the general public, which, according to Sergei Lavrov, is the fault of Kiev and Washington) were discussed during negotiations between Swiss president and chairman of the OSCE Didier Burkhalter and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on May 7. However, on May 11 in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of Ukraine referendums were held which confirmed the choice of the people in favor of the state sovereignty of the new republics which have arisen there. A fundamentally new political situation has taken shape...

On July 23, Prime Minister Boyko Borisov opened the Foreign Minister's annual meeting with Bulgarian ambassadors abroad. The event made it appear that he was not a citizen of Bulgaria and had no interest in making the country prosperous. Looks like he has an implanted chip with a special program making him pursue foreign interests instead of serving his homeland...